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April 2012

April 23, 2012

Last month was our little man's first birthday (can you believe it?!), and to celebrate this milestone, we planned a nice small party down at our favourite local park.

The party was robot-themed of course, decked out in red, blue and silver, with stripey tape and dangly robots and big paper pompoms and extra-special robot-inspired bunting (because it's just not a party without bunting...).

To make the bunting, I bought a handful of circuit boards from Reverse Garbage for $1 a piece, spelt out 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY DANIEL' with plastic letters attached with a little blu-tac, and strung them up with red stripey string. Hey presto, 'robotic' bunting for a teeny $7.

The robot theme was initially inspired by this cute little guy, which we dangled centre stage over the table. He was created especially for Daniel (just after he was born) by my dear friend Tara from Dudley Redhead, lovingly handstitched from soft felt and beautifully detailed with tiny dials and other robot-y things. Little D loves him.

The paper pompoms are the handywork of my sister-in-law, Terri. String a couple of these babies up and you've got instant party pizzazz!

And then there was the robot cake - an absolute show stopper!! It was created by my other sister-in-law, Linda, whose blog Bubble and Sweet documents her amazing and tasty adventures in cake-craft and sweet things on sticks.

I sent Linda a few pics of our little red robot buddy, and she came back with this awesome, steampunked, metallic-fondant-iced, chocolate mudcake on a metallicised baseplate adorned with fondant 'washers' and 'cog cookies'. Oh wow..!

Oh yeh, it was good!

It rained... and it poured... but still we had fun.

Rain. Family. Friends. Laughter. Cake. Drinks... And then finally the sunshine! What a day to remember.

My warmest heartfelt thanks must go to Ashley Oostdyck for all her amazing photography of our little guy's 1st birthday party. Her stunning photos perfectly captured so many special moments of the day :)

All the photos featured in this post (except the Instagram ones) are Ashley's beautiful camera-work, and you can see more of Ash's photographic storytelling over at her website www.ashleyoostdyck.com.

Thank you Ash, and also huge thanks to those who helped pull the party together, and to everyone who came along to celebrate Little D's first remarkable year.

This album shows some of the artworks I've done over the years, and covers a range of mediums including coloured pencil, charcoal, pastel, oils, watercolour, polymer clay, photography, architectural renderings, and a whole mix of others. 'Mix' is a good word...